A Georgian man cries over the body of his relative after a bombardment in Gori

A Georgian man cries over the body of his relative after a bombardment in Gori, 80 km from Georgia's capital city Tbilisi, on August 9, 2008. A Russian warplane dropped a bomb on an apartment block in the Georgian town of Gori, killing at least 5 people, a Reuters reporter said.

Russian planes have attacked the runway of a military airfield near the Georgian capital of Tbilisi.

"Russian planes dropped several bombs on a military airfield not far from Tbilisi International Airport," the secretary of Georgia's national security council, Alexander Lomaia, told AFP.

I strongly support the declaration issued by the Presidents of Poland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, and their commitment that 'aggression against a small country in Europe will not be passed over in silence or with meaningless statements equating the victims with the victimizers.'

I doubt that the Europeans were thinking of Obama when they wrote this, but who knows? Maybe they had seen this "meaningless statement equating the victims with the victimizers" from the Obama campaign:

It’s both sides’ fault — both have been somewhat provocative with each other.

Obama, given his temperament, his self-regard, his blithe ignorance of history and of the material conditions of life on this planet, will never be ready to be President. He is not unready, he is unsuited for, and inadequate to, the office.

Today the Obama and McCain campaigns both put out statements on the Russian invasion. Politico's Ben Smith contrasts them:

While Obama offered a response largely in line with statements issued by democratically elected world leaders, including President Bush, first calling on both sides to negotiate, John McCain took a remarkably — and uniquely — more aggressive stance, siding clearly with Georgia’s pro-Western leaders and placing the blame for the conflict entirely on Russia.

In case that wasn't clear, he adds: "McCain’s initial statement...put him more closely in line with the moral clarity and American exceptionalism projected by President Bush’s first term."

In another weird echo of the Brezhnev years, Obama adviser Mark Brzezinski-- Zbigniew's son--said, "It’s both sides’ fault — both have been somewhat provocative with each other." Sure. Just like the Czechs provoked the Germans in 1938.

In 1944, historian Richard Hofstadter published "Social Darwinism in American Thought", an aggressive and widely influential critique of the libertarian philosopher Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) and his impact on American intellectual life. In Hofstadter's telling, Spencer was the driving force behind "social Darwinism," the pseudo-scientific use of evolution to justify economic and social inequality. According to Hofstadter, Spencer was little more than an apologist for extreme conservatism, a figure who told "the guardians of American society what they wanted to hear." The eugenics movement, Hofstadter maintained, which held that humanity could improve its stock via selective breeding and forced sterilization, "has proved to be the most enduring aspect" of Spencer's "tooth and claw natural selection."

A hit upon publication, the book helped make Hofstadter's name, doing much to secure him his prominent perch at Columbia University, where he taught until his death in 1970. But there's a problem with Hofstadter's celebrated work: His claims bear almost no resemblance to the real Herbert Spencer. In fact, as Princeton University economist Tim Leonard argues in a provocative new article titled "Origins of the Myth of Social Darwinism," [pdf] which is forthcoming from the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, Hofstadter is guilty of both distorting Spencer's free market views and smearing them with the taint of racist Darwinian collectivism.

So what happened? As Leonard notes, Hofstadter was no neutral observer. Rather, he "wrote as an opponent of laissez-faire, and also as a champion of what he took to be its rightful successor, expert-led reform." A one-time member of the Communist party, Hofstadter himself later admitted that the book "was naturally influenced by the political and moral controversy of the New Deal era."

At the heart of Hofstadter's case is the following passage from Spencer's famous first book, Social Statics (1851): "If they are sufficiently complete to live, they do live, and it is well they should live. If they are not sufficiently complete to live, they die, and it is best they should die."

That certainly sounds rough, but as it turns out, Hofstadter failed to mention the first sentence of Spencer's next paragraph, which reads, "Of course, in so far as the severity of this process is mitigated by the spontaneous sympathy of men for each other, it is proper that it should be mitigated." As philosophy professor Roderick Long has remarked, "The upshot of the entire section, then, is that while the operation of natural selection is beneficial, its mitigation by human benevolence is even more beneficial." This is a far cry from Hofstadter's summary of the text, which has Spencer advocating that the "unfit...should be eliminated."

Similarly, Hofstadter repeatedly points to Spencer's famous phrase, "survival of the fittest," a line that Charles Darwin added to the fifth edition of Origin of Species. But by fit, Spencer meant something very different from brute force. In his view, human society had evolved from a "militant" state, which was characterized by violence and force, to an "industrial" one, characterized by trade and voluntary cooperation. Thus Spencer the "extreme conservative" supported labor unions (so long as they were voluntary) as a way to mitigate and reform the "harsh and cruel conduct" of employers.

In fact, far from being the proto-eugenicist of Hofstadter's account, Spencer was an early feminist, advocating the complete legal and social equality of the sexes (and he did so, it's worth noting, nearly two decades before John Stuart Mill's famous On the Subjection of Women first appeared). He was also an anti-imperialist, attacking European colonialists for their "deeds of blood and rapine" against "subjugated races." To put it another way, Spencer was a thoroughgoing classical liberal, a principled champion of individual rights in all spheres of human life. Eugenics, which was based on racism, coercion, and collectivism, was alien to everything that Spencer believed.

The same can't be said, however, for the progressive reformers who lined up against him. Take University of Wisconsin economist John R. Commons, one of the crusading figures that Hofstadter praised for opposing laissez-faire and sharing "a common consciousness of society as a collective whole rather than a congeries of individual atoms." In his book Races and Immigrants in America (1907), Commons described African Americans as "indolent and fickle" and endorsed protectionist labor laws since "competition has no respect for the superior races."

Similarly, progressive darling Theodore Roosevelt held that the 15th Amendment, which gave African-American men the right to vote, was "a mistake," since the black race was "two hundred thousand years behind" the white. Yet despite these and countless other examples of racist pseudo-science being used by leading progressives, Leonard reports that Hofstadter "never applied the epithet `social Darwinist' to a progressive, a practice that continues to this day."

And that's the trouble. Once Hofstadter's smear took hold, it was an uphill battle to set the record straight. Unfortunately, Leonard's persuasive and compelling article alone won't do the trick. But as an explanation of what really happened to Spencer's reputation and as a resource for those who'd like to learn more about his ideas, it's a great place to start.

"Ezra Levant is off the hook and he isn't happy about it. Two years ago, his now-defunct Western Standard magazine - a rare conservative voice in liberal Canada - became one of the few publications to dare reprint the notorious Danish cartoons of Mohammed.

The magazine was headquartered in the province of Alberta, leading two different local Muslim groups to file complaints against Levant with the Alberta Human Rights Commission (AHRC). Established in the 1970s to hear discrimination complaints in the areas of housing and employment, Canada's HRCs slowly morphed into a combination censor board/secret police, "investigating" so-called "hate sites" on the web, fining Christian organizations and individuals found guilty of "offending" gay activists, and charging Canada's oldest magazine, and its columnist Mark Steyn, with "flagrant Islamophobia."

Levant was interrogated by a government bureaucrat this past January - an interrogation he videotaped and posted on YouTube. Levant's mocking, impassioned performance, which challenged the HRC's very legitimacy, was viewed hundreds of thousands of times, made Levant an overnight free speech hero, and ignited a national debate about Canada's beloved policy of multiculturalism.... His legal bills topped $100,000, and he estimates the cases have cost Alberta taxpayers $500,000.

Then, for reasons that remain unclear, one Muslim group - the Supreme Islamic Council run by Imam Syed Soharwardy - suddenly dropped its complaint against Ezra Levant in February. Finally, on August 6, the Edmonton Council of Muslim Communities complaint was dismissed by the Alberta HRC. Levant had "won" what he'd taken to calling "the first blasphemy case in Canada in 80 years."

Like Mark Steyn, he wanted to take the matter further so he could get a precedent-setting verdict in a higher court. There are still 17 other cases against him, however, so he may well have that chance yet.

It seems like a natural fit: a majority of the USA's imported apparel comes from China.

I think two things are revealed by it: first, how amoral THE fashion industry IS, and second how hypocritical.

Fashion execs (a VERY "LIBERAL" CROWD!) care very little about the oppression in China and other nations they do business in. But this oppression does REAL DAMAGE to REAL PEOPLE. Meanwhile, most of these very same execs think that AGW is an important issue. Even though virtually NO ONE has been or is likely to be harmed by it. And despite the fact that CHINA is the world's biggest polluter.

These folks are quick to trash the USA and Bush - as being gluttonous polluters who are causing AGW by consuming too much of the world's resources and "exhaling" too much CO2, but LOOK THE OTHER WAY with regard to China - 'cause China puts mega-money in their pockets.

They tell us we should use consume less and go organic, but they (the super-rich designers/retailers etc) are over-consumers who support an oppressive and mega-polluting nation.

AND ANOTHER THING: Ralph used red, white & blue for the team outfit, but NO FLAG.

HE PUT A HUGE POLO/RALPH LAUREN LOGO ON IT THOUGH.

HOW GAUCHE!

HOW PATHETIC.

Anyhow... China is being praised for the "dazzling" opening ceremony.

Sheesh.

Of course It was GREAT: FASCISTS ARE GREAT AT THESE THINGS!

North Korea can do this - but not feed its people.

And Hitler put on the grandest Olympics ever, too.

IOW: the whole dang enterprise is propaganda BS put on by a bunch of HYPOCRITES.

Friday, August 08, 2008

I think Glenn nails it as well as anyone, both with his comments and links here. You have to feel bad for Elizabeth, but most of all you have to bad for the sorry state of a media that goes to such great lengths to cover this up for so long. This is not a media that cares about the American people being informed; this is a media that only wants to manipulate the people and the way the people vote towards its own (outdated, bankrupt) ideology. The days of Gary Hart are long gone... (emphasis is mine):

Imagine if he'd gotten the nomination. What a selfish bastard — to run for the nomination while parading his cancerous wife about and knowing that if he won this story could have come out at any time — maybe in October — screwing up his party's chances!

Wow. The Edwards story has suddenly appeared on the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the networks — everywhere. John Edwards has somehow become newsworthy again.

Yeah, go figure.

We live in a sick culture--and the media serves only to make it sicker still. An utter disgrace.

UPDATE: A Dallas lawyer, one Fred Baron has come forward and claimed to have bankrolled the "privacy" of Rielle Hunter (pseudonyms, housing, and all). Like John Edwards, Baron is a very, very wealthy attorney, with a home appraised at $17,224,630.00, all 15,254 square feet of it. He and Edwards seem to have quite a bit in common. But of course--like Sgt. Schultz--he knows noootheeng... Right. (via Byron York at The Corner):

The Raleigh News & Observer has a statement from Fred Baron, the Texas trial lawyer who was finance chairman of John Edwards' campaign and who paid to relocate Rielle Hunter and the Andrew Young family from North Carolina to California. From the News & Observer:

"I decided independently to help two friends and former colleagues rebuild their lives when harassment by supermarket tabloids made it impossible for them to conduct a normal life," Baron, a Dallas trial lawyer said in a statement, Rob Christensen reports.

"John Edwards was not aware that assistance was provided to anyone involved in this matter," Baron said. "I did it of my own voilition and without the knowledge, instruction, or suggestion of John Edwards or anyone else. The assistance was offered and accepted without condition."

[....]

Here is what the Dallas Morning News had to say about Baron, a partner in the law firm of Baron and Budd, one of the largest plaintiffs' firms in the Southwest... (emphasis is mine):

Dallas lawyer Fred Baron told The Dallas Morning News today that he paid relocation and housing expenses for the woman that former presidential candidate John Edwards has confessed to having an affair with.

Mr. Baron, who was chairman of Mr. Edwards’ presidential campaign finance committee, said he paid money for Rielle Hunter to move from North Carolina to another location.

He said she and another campaign aide, Andrew Young, who claimed paternity of Ms. Hunter’s child, were being dogged by tabloid reporters who believed she had an affair with Mr. Edwards and fathered the child.

Mr. Baron would not say how much money he provided for the couple's move. He said Mr. Edwards did not know about the arrangement.

“The money was purely and simply to get them out of North Carolina and to get them into a stable place,” he said. "They were unable to afford a second home. It was to give them the ability to live somewhere where they wouldn't be harassed."

Mr. Baron is one of the top Democratic fundraisers in the country and has been instrumental in the Texas Democratic Party's efforts to rebuild. For Mr. Edwards' two presidential campaigns, Mr. Baron raised millions of dollars.

Ramesh Ponnuru had a terrific expose of the Edwards-Budd connection in 2004 entitled "Robber Baron". An excerpt:

... Edwards's selection by Kerry has renewed the debate over tort reform and whether trial lawyers have too much power. Baron casts an interesting light on that story. In a statement attached to a report of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senator Jon Kyl examined the controversial role that Baron's firm, Baron & Budd, has played in asbestos litigation. (The statement is on pages 81-107.) What Senator Kyl turned up suggests that the worries that people often express about trial lawyers seem to be amply justified in the case of this firm — and then some.

The evidence that specious claims are driving asbestos litigation has gotten sporadic attention. At various times the New York Times, Fortune, and columnists Robert Samuelson and Stuart Taylor have run stories on it. Cardozo University law professor Lester Brickman wrote a long article for Pepperdine Law Review this year arguing that "asbestos litigation has become a malignant enterprise." The Dallas Observer has done a terrific series of articles on Baron & Budd's role in that enterprise. Senator Kyl brought some of the evidence together, and added the testimony of witnesses called before the Senate, in a statement added to a committee report on asbestos legislation last year. But it's safe to say that few people are aware of just how badly civil justice has been corrupted in this area.

Kyl began his report by noting that because most exposure to asbestos took place more than 30 years ago, the rate of illness related to asbestos has fallen sharply over the last decade. Asbestosis has been called a "disappearing disease." Yet asbestos claims, Kyl continued, have been increasing. The number of claimants filing tripled between 1999 and 2001, to more than 90,000. The number appears to be rising still: Brickman estimates conservatively that there were 110,000 new claimants in 2003. The number of defendants has increased, too. Asbestos litigation has driven 78 companies to bankruptcy, according to University of California, San Diego, economics professor Michelle White, with a disproportionate number of the bankruptcies occurring in recent years.

Why are the trend-lines going in opposite directions? Professor Brickman concludes that 80-90 percent of recent claims are specious. How have these claims been generated? By coaching witnesses to provide false testimony, Brickman and Kyl argue, and by faking medical tests.

A Rand study found that by 1995, ten law firms accounted for three quarters of the asbestos lawsuits. Kyl's statement quotes an academic who estimates that just two firms account for half of the cases. Baron & Budd is one of them.

The firm suffered some embarrassment seven years ago, when a memo telling clients how to "prepare" for their depositions was accidentally released. The firm has claimed that quotations from the memo are damning only because they have been taken out of context. But Senator Kyl attached the whole memo to the committee report on asbestos, and it is hard to come up with an innocent explanation as an alternative to Sen. Kyl's view that it is a document coaching witnesses to lie. (It's on pages 109-131 of the link above.)

Many defendants with only minor roles in the asbestos industry have wondered how so many plaintiffs were able to identify their products as having caused them harm. A defense lawyer says in Kyl's statement: "We know...of locations where not only was our product not there, but [it] would have had no function there. Yet in case after case, Baron & Budd sues us and gets product ID and comes up with at least three or four co-workers [who identify the product]." The memo solves that mystery. It gives detailed information about which products would be used where, by whom, for what purposes. As Kyl writes, "Each description goes well beyond what one would think necessary to refresh the memory of someone who had actually worked with the product. Instead, the memo appears to anticipate that clients will not have any previous familiarity with the product."

The memo tells clients caught in a discrepancy to blame it on "the 'girl from Baron & Budd.'" It instructs them to say various things that will be legally helpful to them, without regard for whether they are true. ("You will be asked if you ever saw any WARNING labels on containers of asbestos. It is important to maintain that you NEVER saw any labels on asbestos products that said WARNING or DANGER.") It assures them that they will never be found out. ("Keep in mind that [defense] attorneys are very young and WERE NOT PRESENT at the jobsites you worked at. They have NO RECORDS to tell them what products were used on a particular job, even if they act like they do.")

According to Kyl's statement, the Dallas Observer found a former Baron & Budd paralegal who said that when she complained to a partner in the firm that a client had "absolutely no exposure to asbestos," the partner told her to "be creative." Her supervisor told her to "'make up stuff.'" Another former paralegal, who worked to get witnesses to testify about their supposed exposure to specific products between 1940 and 1970, told the Observer, "What I was doing was fraudulent. There was never any doubt in my mind about it." All of this is, again, in Kyl's statement.

Peas in a pod. One senses that this story has a lot of legs--provided any journalists actually choose to investigate. Don't hold your breath.

ABC notes, "His political action committee later paid her $114,000 to produce campaign website documentaries despite her lack of experience." If you gave to Edwards' PAC, you may want a refund, unless you intended to underwrite Edwards' mistress slush fund.

A SLUSH FUND/HUSH FUND...

THIS IS WHAT JESSE JACKSON DID TO SUPPORT THE MOTHER OF HIS LOVE CHILD.

From a media standpoint, the Edwards story reminds me of Eason Jordan. As we noted here, Jordan, then CNN's top news executive, resigned following a new-media firestorm that the mainstream media had, up to that point, studiously ignored. We wrote at the time:

If, like most people, you relied on the conventional media for your news, you would not only be late to the party, you would have no idea what is going on--your first knowledge of anything out of the ordinary would be Jordan's resignation. Assuming even that will be reported. It would be an interesting assignment: trying to write a story on Jordan's resignation for a paper that has not heretofore covered the controversy. If Jordan had just announced he wanted to spend more time with his family, he would have made their task easier.

Likewise with Edwards. Those who get their news from the New York Times will be left wondering why on earth Edwards is on television confessing to an affair. Still, it's nice to see that our newspapers are capable of such discretion. If only they would apply a similar code of silence to, say, illegal leaks from disgruntled CIA staffers.

THE MSM IS MORE LOYAL TO THE LEFT THAN THE USA,

AND MORE LEFTIST THAN PATRIOTIC.

UNTIL THEY BECOME POLITICALLY DIVERSE, THEY WILL REMAIN A MAJOR PART OF THE PROBLEM -

Today Thursday, August 7, 2008 Barack Obama told a 7 year old in a classroom that America is not doing well - that it is NOT an exceptional country - letting his enormous black racist resentment bubble to the surface on national television. Tonight two Hip Hop street dancers, who happen to be black were the finalists on "So You Think You Can Dance". They beat out over 100,000 dancers who tried out for the show in that America Barack so despises. They garnered over 60 million votes for the finale. Hey Barack - some racist unexceptional country - right?

Barack is racially disconnected from both dancers who were from welfare families who never had the money to pay for dance lessons much less be go to college and become a stuck up better-than-everyone elite snob lawyer. On top of that Barack doesn't even wear the meanest racist pants in the family - that is reserved for Michelle who has never been proud of "mean" America.

Somewhere there is a message for this pretender who preaches hope for an America gone wrong - who arrogantly thinks he and he alone can solve its problems. Obama is a charlatan who stumps for reparations - then claims he is not talking about cash reparations. The "change" he preaches is only the change you'll have in your pocket after he imposes his new punishing street organizer's tax regime on America.

Delightfully "Joshua" and "Twitch" are men - strong men with an abiding faith in God. Joshua upon winning praised God above all others. Apparently they did not go to Trinity United and whine like a bunch of babies. They got to work with what they had and performed ballet, contemporary, jazz, ballroom, Latin better than and with more heart than all those with years of training and experience.

It is the strength of Twitch and Joshua that makes America great. Joshua's final thought was "Don't let anybody say you can't do it." Now that is an American. Obama on the other hand tells grammar school kids their country is crap. What a loser the Democrats have nominated as their candidate for President.

Too bad Barack Obama is not from the America we love and cherish and truly believe to be an exceptional country and society. He is from a distant place not worthy of recognition or comment.

All the claims about global warming causing hurricanes have by now been very widely debunked so the Warmists have to find some alternative disaster. So now they turn to rain. It's basic physics that warmer seas will lead to more precipitation but Warmists don't care about basic physics so they have to "discover" the same thing by some more roundabout route. "Powerful rainstorms" are now said to be a problem caused by warming.

A problem?? What it wrong with heavy rain? It is great for crops. I grew up in the tropics, where we measured our annual rainfall not in inches but in yards. And the rain was so heavy we used to say that it came down "in sheets". All that rain was slightly pesky at times but the environment sure was lush and all the crops grew like mad. We had fields of grass that was over 6' high. And the grass concerned (sugar cane) was and is the world's cheapest source of sugar and ethanol. Heavier rain would be GREAT!

And India and much of Asia have lived with monsoonal rain for millennia. They seem to have survived somehow. People actually welcome the monsoon there, funnily enough

Climate models have long predicted that global warming will increase the intensity of extreme precipitation events. A new study conducted at the University of Miami and the University of Reading (U.K.) provides the first observational evidence to confirm the link between a warmer climate and more powerful rainstorms.

One of the most serious challenges humanity will face in response to global warming is adapting to changes in extreme weather events. Of utmost concern is that heavy rainstorms will become more common and more intense in a warmer climate due to the increased moisture available for condensation. More intense rain events increase the risk of flooding and can have substantial societal and economic impacts.

To understand how precipitation responds to a warmer climate, researchers in this study used naturally-driven changes associated with El Ni¤o as a laboratory for testing their hypotheses. Based on 20 years of satellite observations, they found a distinct link between tropical rainfall extremes and temperature, with heavy rain events increasing during warm periods and decreasing during cold periods. "A warmer atmosphere contains larger amounts of moisture which boosts the intensity of heavy downpours," said Dr. Brian J. Soden, associate professor at the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine & Atmospheric Science.

The report, "Atmospheric Warming and the Amplification of Precipitation Extremes," previewed in Science Express this Thursday, August 7, and published in an upcoming issue of Science, found that both observations and models indicated an increase in heavy rainstorms in response to a warmer climate. However, the observed amplification of rainfall extremes was found to be substantially larger in the observations than what is predicted by current models. "Comparing observations with results from computer models improves understanding of how rainfall responds to a warming world" said Dr. Richard P. Allan, NERC advance fellow at the University of Reading's Environmental Systems Science Centre. "Differences can relate to deficiencies in the measurements, or the models used to predict future climatic change"

The record of Barack Obama, throughout his political career, demonstrates conclusively that Obama is hardly a reformer. His image of "Hope and Change" is actually a huge lie. There is not a single instant in Obama's political career where he did something for the sake of reforms and change.

Obama also has a shady history. The skeletons in his closet are of far-left positions, and political corruption. His campaign, like those of most left-wing Democrats, is about using the taxpayer's money to stay in power, and benefit his political cronies.

The Barack Obama Campaign is very much about the old politics, not some new swing of hope and change. He is the epitomy of the corrupt politician, and he is surrounded by the corrupt as well.

David Freddoso is a reporter that was watching his fellow columnists and journalists fawn over Barack Obama, and it seemed a little overboard to him. So he began to investigate Obama, looking closely at Barack's record. The resulting conclusion, and many detailed revelations about Barack Obama, has been put into the book, "The Case Against Barack Obama." David is my guest tonight on Political Pistachio Radio to discuss the book, and Barack Obama.

Join us live at 10:00 pm Eastern Time for the interview, or you can check out the archive later. Go HERE for the program.

I imagine that the ACLU are trying to silence people from saying the obvious but I will say it anyway: Blacks are MUCH MORE LIKELY TO COMMIT VIOLENT CRIMES THAN WHITES ARE. If it makes me a racist to state that plain truth then so be it. If it takes a racist to tell the truth then racists must be fine people. Maybe the ACLU are trying to give racism a good name

"Legislators should toughen a law passed in 2001 to prohibit racial profiling by Louisiana law enforcement agencies, the American Civil Liberties Union said....

Grote said the study, entitled "Unequal Under the Law" and released Wednesday, was conducted in the first three months of 2007, using arrest data from sheriff's and police departments from St. Tammany, Avoyelles, and DeSoto parishes. Legislators have not yet seen the report.

Using demographics of communities and parishes taken from the U.S. Census, the ACLU determined the rate at which people of color were arrested compared to whites. "In every town, city and parish examined, people of color were arrested at a higher rate than their representation in the population," the report said."

A day after saying the U.S. could produce enough renewable energy within 10 years to replace all U.S. imports of Middle East oil -- a goal even he admitted sounded "pie in the sky" -- Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., said "for the sake of our economy, our security, and the future of our planet, we must end the age of oil in our time."

At the beginning of his town hall meeting focused on energy policy at the Austintown Fitch High School this morning, in this blue-collar burg in a pivotal swing state, Obama told the estimated crowd of 2,400 Ohioans, "I can tell this is a feisty group."

But the senator's feistiness was on display as well, as he mocked his Republican opponent's campaign tactics and energy plan, and pushed an aggressive "use it or lose it" strategy for offshore oil leases. Seeking to shift focus away from the debate over whether oil companies should be permitted to conduct more offshore drilling exploration, Obama said, "Right now, oil companies have access to 68 million acres where they aren't drilling. So we should start by giving them a choice: use it or lose it. Use the land you have, or give up your leases to someone who will."

After Obama noted local gas prices -- $3.70 a gallon, "two and a half times what it cost when President Bush took office" - a member of the audience yelled out: "They had a plan!" "They had a plan," agreed Obama. "Problem was it was the oil company plan. It was the gas company plan. We need a people plan! And that's why I'm running for president."

"Krug" is German/Yiddish for "jug". Krugman Excerpt: "The only way we're going to get action, I'd suggest, is if those who stand in the way of action come to be perceived as not just wrong but immoral. [.] Martin Weitzman, a Harvard economist who has been driving much of the recent high-level debate, offers some sobering numbers. Surveying a wide range of climate models, he argues that, over all, they suggest about a 5 percent chance that world temperatures will eventually rise by more than 10 degrees Celsius (that is, world temperatures will rise by 18 degrees Fahrenheit). As Mr. Weitzman points out, that's enough to "effectively destroy planet Earth as we know it." It's sheer irresponsibility not to do whatever we can to eliminate that threat".

Dr. Martin Hertzberg is a retired Navy meteorologist with a PhD in physical chemistry. His letter to the jug man follows:

Dear Prof Krugman:

I have generally found myself in strong agreement with most of the opinions expressed in your columns dealing with politics and the economy. I am a lifelong liberal Democrat, but I am also a scientist. In your interview with Keith Obermann last night, there was an implication that somehow those of us who are human-caused global warming skeptics were all supported by big-oil money. In the 20 years that I have been studying this issue and expressing my skepticism, I have never received a cent from either big-oil or the government to study the problem. You failed to mention the 50 billion being spent by governments to finance research that supports the human-caused global warming theory. In this morning's article "Can This Planet Be Saved", you simply regurgitated the typical fear-mongering hysteria that the Gore-IPCC-Hansen clique promulgate without any serious consideration of the fact that that hysteria is based on half-baked computer models that have never been verified and that are totally our of touch with reality. I am sure that as an Economist you have seen similar econometric models that are similarly out of touch with reality coming from the likes of "the Chicago boys" or the Heritage Foundation.

I have taken the liberty of attaching copies of Alexander Cockburn's articles that appeared in the Nation Magazine last year. They are based, in part, on my studies of the issue. Also attached is a recent talk I gave on the subject. It has been published in the Australian web-site: http://www.carbon-sense.com. Also attached is a list of web-sites of global warming skeptics.

I can only hope that you will read the attachments with an open mind and consider the possibility that you might need an informed and objective science adviser before making any further pronouncements on the subject. I will also forward under separate cover, a letter I sent to the President of the American Physical Society about their treatment of a well known global warming sceptic, Lord Monckton. If you might recall, he had routinely advertized in the N. Y. Times, challenging Gore to a debate on the issue, which Gore ignored. You can always tell the difference between a propagandist and a scientist. If a scientist has a theory, he looks diligently for facts that might contradict his theory so that he can test its validity or refine it. The propagandist on the other hand selects only those facts that agree with his theory and dutifully ignores those facts that contradict it.

Climate statistician Dr. William M. Briggs, who specializes in the statistics of forecast evaluation and serves on the American Meteorological Society's Probability and Statistics Committee, also criticizes the jug man. Excerpt:

Krugman advocates: painting those who do not agree with him as not just wrong but immoral. That is to say, not just wrong, but evil. Krugman, limited in imagination as he is, cannot conceive that anybody could possibly disagree with him, nor look at the same data and come to a different conclusion. People that fail to accord with him are not just making a mistake, they are being mischievous. Krugman is not the first to suffer from this kind of delusion. La Shawn Barber has written an article called Is Climate Change. Racist? He looks at liberal Congressman James Clyburn, who has written a report echoing the old joke: "World Ends Due to Global Warming: Poor Blacks Hardest Hit." The gist is that those who disagree with the end-time visions risk being called a racist, a frightening term in today's USA. University of Amsterdam "philosopher" Marc Davidson has even written a peer-reviewed paper in a prominent journal alluding that those who disagree with Weitzman-like claims are no better than slave holders (no, I'm not kidding).

Tonight, August 7, at 8:00 P.M. Phoenix time, Pastorius, webmaster of Infidel Bloggers Alliance,will host "Voices of Freedom," a one-hour weekly show on KFNX 1100. See this time-zone chart (Refresh the page!) if you are in a different time zone than Phoenix, Arizona; click directly on the word "PHOENIX" to get a world map of time zones.

Tonight's guests are Ayisha, Mohammed's child bride; Mohammed the Dog; and Robert Spencer.

Tune in if you can! In addition to AM air time at the scheduled hour, KFNX offers live streaming at the station's web site.

The Tucson Sector Border Patrol agent was held at gunpoint by the Mexican military on Sunday night south of Ajo. (2544)

Members of the Mexican military crossed into Arizona on Sunday night and held a US Border Guard at gunpoint.The Washington Times reported:

A U.S. Border Patrol agent was held at gunpoint Sunday night by members of the Mexican military who had crossed the border into Arizona, but the soldiers returned to Mexico without incident when backup agents responded to assist.

Agents assigned to the Border Patrol station at Ajo, Ariz., said the Mexican soldiers crossed the international border in an isolated area about 100 miles southwest of Tucson and pointed rifles at the agent, who was not identified.

It was unclear what the soldiers were doing in the United States, but U.S. law enforcement authorities have long said that current and former Mexican military personnel have been hired to protect drug and migrant smugglers.

"Unfortunately, this sort of behavior by Mexican military personnel has been going on for years," union Local 2544 of the National Border Patrol Council (NBPC) said on its Web page. "They are never held accountable, and the United States government will undoubtedly brush this off as another case of 'Oh well, they didn't know they were in the United States.'

"Unfortunately, this sort of behavior by Mexican military personnel has been going on for years," union Local 2544 of the National Border Patrol Council (NBPC) said on its Web page. "They are never held accountable, and the United States government will undoubtedly brush this off as another case of 'Oh well, they didn't know they were in the United States.'

This is a disgrace; did we not fight (and win) a bloody WAR with Mexico for sovereignity over the border states?

No matter how you may feel about immigrants, it is never right to have laws on the books if you aren't going to enforce them. And to allow incursions into the United States by a foreign military force??

The Supreme Court on Wednesday reversed a 2006 decision by the Jerusalem District Court according to which the Palestinian Authority is immune from lawsuits filed by private individuals because it has the elements of a sovereign or quasi-sovereign entity.

In doing so, the court accepted an appeal by the Society of the Eilon Moreh Seminary, whose lawsuit against the PA was rejected two years ago by the Jerusalem court.

The 2006 ruling came in the wake of a lawsuit lodged earlier that year by the Society, an organization established to purchase land in the West Bank. The seminary sued the sheikh of a village in Area A, which is under complete PA control, for falsely declaring that people agreeing to sell village land to the society indeed owned the land. After the society paid for the land, it emerged that the sheikh's affidavit was false.

The society sued the sheikh in Tel Aviv's District Court and won. But the estate of the sheikh, who had meanwhile died, ignored the ruling and did not pay. The society then sued the PA and the Israeli government in the Jerusalem District Court for the damages they could not collect from the sheikh's estate.

But Judge Boaz Okun ruled then that Israel cannot compel the PA to exercise a prerogative that belongs to it and which, together with other prerogatives that Israel has recognized, give the authority elements of sovereignty.

The judge wrote that after the Six Day War, the IDF commander of the West Bank was the source of authority in the area, based on the rules of international law. But the situation changed after the signing of the Interim Agreement, which dealt with the 'status of the occupied territories' and recognized the Palestinian Authority in these territories.

The Society of the Eilon Moreh Seminar was represented in court by attorneys Nitsana Darshan-Leitner and Roi Kochavi of the Shurat HaDin Israel Law Center. According to a press release issued by the advocacy, one of the results of the ruling is that, should the PA lose lawsuits and refuse to pay as per court order, the plaintiffs will be able to draw the payment from PA tax money, which is held by Israel and amounts to approximately NIS 7 million a month.

Darshan-Leitner said the verdict was not only a victory for the Society but for all terror victims. "This is a decisive blow to the PA's attempts to shirk its responsibility to the damages and suffering it has caused, and still causes, to many of the nation's citizens," she said.

I'm glad that the court was responsible here, as the demonic PA cannot be allowed to get away with their heinous crimes.

"Starting in 2002, Spokane, Wash., journalist Sherry Jones toiled weekends on a racy historical novel about Aisha, the young wife of the prophet Muhammad. Ms. Jones learned Arabic, studied scholarly works about Aisha's life, and came to admire her protagonist as a woman of courage. When Random House bought her novel last year in a $100,000, two-book deal, she was ecstatic. This past spring, she began plans for an eight-city book tour after the Aug. 12 publication date of "The Jewel of Medina" -- a tale of lust, love and intrigue in the prophet's harem.

It's not going to happen: In May, Random House abruptly called off publication of the book. The series of events that torpedoed this novel are a window into how quickly fear stunts intelligent discourse about the Muslim world.

Random House feared the book would become a new "Satanic Verses," the Salman Rushdie novel of 1988 that led to death threats, riots and the murder of the book's Japanese translator, among other horrors. In an interview about Ms. Jones's novel, Thomas Perry, deputy publisher at Random House Publishing Group, said that it "disturbs us that we feel we cannot publish it right now." He said that after sending out advance copies of the novel, the company received "from credible and unrelated sources, cautionary advice not only that the publication of this book might be offensive to some in the Muslim community, but also that it could incite acts of violence by a small, radical segment."

After consulting security experts and Islam scholars, Mr. Perry said the company decided "to postpone publication for the safety of the author, employees of Random House, booksellers and anyone else who would be involved in distribution and sale of the novel."

Al Gore said the other day that "the future of human civilization" depends on giving up fossil fuels within a decade -- and was acclaimed as a prophet by the political class. Obviously boring reality doesn't count for much these days. Even so, when Barack Obama wheels out an energy agenda nearly as grandiose as Mr. Gore's, shouldn't it receive at least some media scrutiny?

On Monday, Mr. Obama said that the U.S. must "end the age of oil in our time," with "real results by the end of my first term in office." This, he said, will "take nothing less than a complete transformation of our economy." Mark that one down as the understatement of the year. Maybe Mr. Obama really is the Green Hornet, or some other superhero of his current political myth.

The Senator calls for $150 billion over 10 years to achieve "energy independence," with elevated subsidies for renewable alternatives and efficiency programs. He also says he'll "leverage billions more in private capital to build a new energy economy," euphemistically referring to his climate plan to tax and regulate greenhouse gases. Every President since Nixon has declared "energy independence," as Mr. Obama noted. But this time, he says, things will change.

They won't. And not because of "the old politics," or whatever. Currently, alternative sources -- wind, solar, biomass, hydroelectric and geothermal -- provide less than 7% of yearly domestic consumption. Throw out hydro and geothermal, and it's only 4%. For the foreseeable future, renewables simply cannot provide the scale and volume of energy needed to meet growing U.S. demand, which is expected to increase by 20% over the next two decades. Even with colossal taxpayer subsidies, renewables probably can't even slow the rate of growth of carbon-based fuel consumption, much less replace it.

Take wind power, which has grown rapidly though still only provides about two-thirds of 1% of all U.S. electricity. The Energy Department optimistically calculates that ramping up merely to 20% by 2030 would require more than $2 trillion and turbines across the Midwest "wind corridor," plus multiple offshore installations. And we'll need a new "transmission superhighway system" of more than 12,000 miles of electric lines to connect the wind system to population centers. A mere $150 billion won't cut it. Mr. Obama also didn't mention that this wind power will be more expensive than traditional sources like coal.

Wind, too, is intermittent: It isn't always blowing and can't be accessed on demand when people need electricity. Since there's no cost-effective way to store large amounts of electricity, wind requires "spinning reserve," or nonalternative baseload power to avoid blackouts. That baseload power is now provided largely by coal, nuclear and natural gas, and wind can't displace much. The same problem afflicts solar energy -- now one-hundredth of 1% of net U.S. electric generation. One of the top uses of solar panels is to heat residential swimming pools.

Mr. Obama also says he wants to mandate that all new cars and trucks are "flexible fuel" vehicles, meaning that they can run on higher concentrations of corn ethanol mixed with gasoline, or second-generation biofuels if those ever come onto the market. Like wind and solar, this would present major land use problems: According to credible estimates, land areas larger than the size of Texas would need to be planted with fuel feedstocks to displace just half the oil America imports every day. Meanwhile, the economic distortions caused by corn ethanol -- such as higher food prices -- have been bad enough.

And yet there's more miracle work to do. Mr. Obama promises to put at least one million plug-in electric vehicles on the road by 2015. That's fine if consumers want to buy them. But even if technical battery problems are overcome, this would only lead to "fuel switching" -- if cars don't use gasoline, the energy still has to come from somewhere. And the cap-and-trade program also favored by Mr. Obama would effectively bar new coal plants, while new nuclear plants are only now being planned after a 30-year hiatus thanks to punishing regulations and lawsuits.

Problems like these are the reality of "alternative" energy, and they explain why every "energy independence" plan has faltered since the 1970s. But just because Mr. Obama's plan is wildly unrealistic doesn't mean that a program of vast new taxes, subsidies and mandates wouldn't be destructive. The U.S. has a great deal invested in fossil fuels not because of a political conspiracy or because anyone worships carbon but because other sources of energy are, right now, inferior.

Consumption isn't rising because of wastefulness. The U.S. produces more than twice as much GDP today per unit of energy as it did in the 1950s, yet energy use has risen threefold. That's because energy use is tethered to growth, and the economy continues to innovate and expand. Mr. Obama seems to have other ideas.

During yesterday's Special Report, Charles Krauthammer unleashed a major-league beat-down on Barack Obama's unhinged "energy" policy. Batten down the hatches...

KRAUTHAMMER: The gas tax holiday was hokey and cheap, and this is hokier and cheaper, because to take from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve is to jeopardize our national security. It really is for supply interruption, which would be a catastrophe for our country.

To take stuff out is going to have negligible effect on price, it will have an effect for a day or two. The amount he wants to take out is about a week's worth of imports. It's absurd.

And if you wanted to remove from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, at least you should be in favor of drilling so that, domestically, in a few years, we will have essentially new strategic reserves in the Arctic or offshore, which would substitute for draining the reserves we currently have.

So his position is contradictory, cheap, and political.

And the stuff he said only a week ago in Missouri on Wednesday of last week, if we only inflated our tires it would substitute for all the oil that the Republicans want to drill for is a towering absurdity.

The amount we would save in our tires generously calculated is about 1/200 of what you get from offshore oil alone, and the amount of oil shale is in the West would give us 10,000 years worth of the gasoline saved by inflating our tires.

The problem with the Democratic position is they always say 'let's do x' instead of drilling. What the American people understand is you do x, y, and z, and everything.

But the reason not to drill is untenable. You drill as well, and that will help us as well...

Barack Obama is everywhere like a celebrity doing the rounds promoting his latest movie. But, at the same time, he is a stealth candidate. We don't really know that much about him other than what we can see.

What they ("the lost years") portray is a Barack Obama sharply at variance with the image of the post-racial, post-ideological, bipartisan, culture-war-shunning politician familiar from current media coverage and purveyed by the Obama campaign.

As details of Obama’s early political career emerge into the light, his associations with such radical figures as Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Father Michael Pfleger, Reverend James Meeks, Bill Ayers, and Bernardine Dohrn look less like peculiar instances of personal misjudgment and more like intentional political partnerships.

At his core, in other words, the politician chronicled here is profoundly race-conscious, exceedingly liberal, free-spending even in the face of looming state budget deficits, and partisan.

Elected president, this man would presumably shift the country sharply to the left on all the key issues of the day-culture-war issues included. It’s no wonder Obama has passed over his Springfield years in relative silence.

Krauthammer, the psychiatrist, is better at economics than the economist, Krugman. Dr. Charles Krauthammer remains the clearest thinker in the punditocracy. Former Enron advisor Paul Krugman, not so much. The two squared off today on Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco's statement that by shutting down new oil production in the USA, she is saving the world. Krugman in the New York Times:

"In themselves, limits on offshore drilling are only a modest-sized issue. But the skirmish over drilling is the opening stage of a much bigger fight over environmental policy. What's at stake in that fight, above all, is the question of whether we'll take action against climate change before it's utterly too late.

"It's true that scientists don't know exactly how much world temperatures will rise if we persist with business as usual. But that uncertainty is actually what makes action so urgent. While there's a chance that we'll act against global warming only to find that the danger was overstated, there's also a chance that we'll fail to act only to find that the results of inaction were catastrophic. Which risk would you rather run?"

OK, so the economist gives the political and pseudo-climatologist response. We won't drill here and therefore we will be on the road to saving the planet from this generation's apocalyptic fear. The last one was global cooling. Before that it was a nuclear holocaust.

Krauthammer in the Washington Post pointed out the obvious; by not drilling here, we buy oil from Third World venues, where it is drilled under less pristine conditions. That is the economist's response. Wrote Krauthammer:

"There are a dizzying number of economic and national security arguments for drilling at home: a $700 billion oil balance-of-payments deficit, a gas tax (equivalent) levied on the paychecks of American workers and poured into the treasuries of enemy and terror-supporting regimes, growing dependence on unstable states of the Persian Gulf and Caspian basin. Pelosi and the Democrats stand athwart, shouting: We don't care. We come to save the planet! "They seem blissfully unaware that the argument for their drill-there-not-here policy collapses on its own environmental terms."

In summation, not drilling offshore does not "save the planet." It spends it.

An anti-Israel antisemite writes some rather unpleasant stuff about rich Jews in a French periodical and gets fired over it. A columnist in the NYT with the distinctively Muslim surname of Cohen defends the free speech rights of the foul Frog and says he should not have been fired. And I agree with the NYT columnist!

I rarely agree with anything in the NY Pravda and I am about as pro-Israel as you can get so it does feel pretty odd.

OPENING ANWR AND THE OCS TO OIL DRILLING IS AT LEAST AS IMPORTANT TO OUR FUTURE AND OUR CHILDREN'S CHILDREN'S FUTURE AS KEEPING OUR CURRENT ENTITLEMENT PROGRAMS - SOCIAL SECURITY AND MEDICARE - SOLVENT.

IF WE DONT START NOW, THEN THE ADDITIONAL ENERGY WON'T BE THERE WHEN THEY NEED IT.

A little inconvenient truth about Al Gore, from this source, in an article entitled "Al Gore, Oilman":

It was two weeks ago, that Al Gore challenged Americans to “move quickly and boldly to shake off complacency, throw aside old habits and rise, clear-eyed and alert, to the necessity of big changes” by jumping on his alternative energy bandwagon. In a much-hyped speech July 17, the former vice president urged the nation “to commit to producing 100 percent of our electricity from renewable energy and truly clean carbon-free sources within 10 years.”

Gore acknowledged that achieving his ambitious goal would be difficult: “To be sure, reaching the goal of 100 percent renewable and truly clean electricity within 10 years will require us to overcome many obstacles.”

[...]

Ironically, one of the many obstacles to “reaching the goal of 100 percent renewable and truly clean electricity within 10 years” is none other than the wily Al Gore himself.

That’s because even though he claims Americans must work to end their dependence on oil and must stop generating electricity using fossil fuels within a decade or face certain catastrophe, Gore continues to have a financial interest in fossil fuels....

Two studies in the news this week. A study in Stockholm reveals that there's a demand for virginity operations in the city. Among those who want to do the operation are women who've been raped and wish to conceal the fact. The full report will be published in 2009. In Denmark a PHD student wrote a thesis about Danish imams, discovering that there are all sorts.

Radicalism and Terrorism

A British think tank published a disputed study about Islamic extremism on British campuses. The study shows a significant number of Muslims would want Sharia law in Muslims and would justify killing to protect their religion.

A jury in London reached a deadlock in the trial of three Muslims accused of helping the July 7 bombers. The case is probably going to a retrial. Meanwhile, a top military officer says that British Muslims are fighting for the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Finland is considering legalizing male circumcision, based on the child's consent. The practice is carried out by both Jews and Muslims, though Jewish children undergo the operation when they're eight days old, making consent difficult.

Amr Khaled, a leading Egyptian Muslim preacher accuses enemies of Islam of wanting to drive out Muslims from Europe, or to provoke them enough that they'll be banished. Apparently not something to worry about for long, as he says they'll be a majority in 20 years. Khaled also said that Europeans don't know anything about Islam. Channel 4 is trying to change that. In the UK Shia Muslims are upset at their depiction in a documentary about the Koran.